The increasing capabilities of conversational agents (CAs) offer manifold opportunities to assist users in a variety of tasks. In an organizational context, particularly their potential to simulate a human-like interaction via natural language currently attracts attention both at the customer interface as well as for internal purposes, often in the form of chatbots. Emerging experimental studies on CAs look into the impact of anthropomorphic design elements, so-called social cues, on user perception. However, while these studies provide valuable prescriptive knowledge of selected social cues, they neglect the potential detrimental influence of the limited responsiveness of present-day conversational agents. In practice, many CAs fail to continuously provide meaningful responses in a conversation due to the open nature of natural language interaction, which negatively influences user perception and often led to CAs being discontinued in the past. Thus, designing a CA that provides a human-like interaction experience while minimizing the risks associated with limited conversational capabilities represents a substantial design problem. This study addresses the aforementioned problem by proposing and evaluating a design for a CA that offers a human-like interaction experience while mitigating negative effects due to limited responsiveness. Through the presentation of the artifact and the synthesis of prescriptive knowledge in the form of a nascent design theory for anthropomorphic enterprise CAs, this research adds to the growing knowledge base for designing human-like assistants and supports practitioners seeking to introduce them into their organizations.

中文翻译：

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设计拟人化的企业对话代理

会话代理 (CA) 不断增强的功能提供了多种机会来帮助用户完成各种任务。在组织环境中，特别是它们通过自然语言模拟类人交互的潜力目前在客户界面和内部目的上都引起了人们的注意，通常以聊天机器人的形式出现。关于 CA 的新兴实验研究着眼于拟人化设计元素，即所谓的社会线索，对用户感知的影响。然而，虽然这些研究提供了对选定的社会线索的有价值的规范性知识，但它们忽略了当今对话代理有限响应的潜在不利影响。在实践中，由于自然语言交互的开放性，许多 CA 无法在对话中持续提供有意义的响应，这会对用户感知产生负面影响，并且过去常常导致 CA 停止使用。因此，设计一个提供类人交互体验同时最小化与有限对话能力相关的风险的 CA 代表了一个重大的设计问题。本研究通过提出和评估 CA 设计来解决上述问题，该设计可提供类似人的交互体验，同时减轻由于响应能力有限造成的负面影响。通过对拟人化企业 CA 的新生设计理论形式的人工制品的展示和规定性知识的综合，